


Mess In A Dress: What's Wrong With "Cremona"

by PlaidAdder



Series: Cabin Pressure Meta [3]
Category: Cabin Pressure
Genre: Cremona, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-17
Updated: 2015-08-17
Packaged: 2018-04-15 05:57:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4595490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like “Boston,” “Cremona” tries out something you will thankfully never see again on “Cabin Pressure”: A plot driven almost purely by testosterone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mess In A Dress: What's Wrong With "Cremona"

I don’t listen to “Cremona” much because…well…I don’t like it much.

In the marathon spirit I’m giving it another listen now…and I like it even less.

Like “Boston,” “Cremona” tries out something you will thankfully never see again on “Cabin Pressure”: A plot driven almost purely by testosterone.

Specifically, the whole plot revolves around the fact that Douglas, Martin, and Arthur are all so anxious to secure the approval of the Beautiful Woman that they get themselves involved in disastrous shenanigans. Douglas at least is able to play it cool and keep his wits about him, but he’s just as keen to impress Hester as Martin and Arthur are. Meanwhile Carolyn, who gets to see the ‘real’ Hester because she’s another woman, hates Hester and is trying to enlist the others in her plan to torment her. 

I get very impatient with this plot because a) it’s done so often b) it’s pretty much always going to be misogynistic to some extent, it’s just a matter of degree. The idea that men become blithering idiots when they’re in the presence of a physically attractive woman appears to be unbelievably funny to straight men, but since it props up the very damaging idea that men are not responsible for what they do when they’re aroused, I find it less amusing. 

Then there is the fact that often, although not always, the Beautiful Woman’s characterization is the expression of a male resentment at all the Beautiful Women they wanted and couldn’t have. This is clearly the case with Hester, because she is a complete and total bitch. In addition to hating and loathing her (apparently exclusively male) fans, she is cruel to the happy and lovable Arthur, malicious in her ‘flirting’ with Martin, and downright rude with Carolyn. She uses Martin’s pathetic desire to be a Real Man to manipulate him into signing up for a hotel room which she undoubtedly realizes Carolyn has no intention of paying for, and which he can’t possibly afford himself. She is a character who was designed to be punished, and in the end she is–appropriately, by being forced into intimacy with the very geek boys whose love she despises and rejects.

So these are the reasons why I dislike “Cremona” on a deep-structure level. But even on the surface, it’s really the biggest dog in Season 1. The writing is not as fresh, and relies more on sitcommy cliches. Cumberbatch does a great job with the stammering-for-Hester thing but it’s used too often. Basically the best-written part of the episode is Douglas’s “Fly Me To The Moon” cabin address.

BUT–and I guess this is my point–Finnemore obviously doesn’t like this plot very much either, because he never goes back to it. We get a bit of a retread of the stammering-Martin-tries-to-make-it-with-a-woman thing in “Newcastle,” but there at least the attraction is based on something other than her being a Beautiful Woman; and it is fortunately not overused in “Vidouz,” where Martin’s thing for Teresa kind of grows on him gradually as he gets to know her. But otherwise, despite the fact that Martin frequently complains about his lack of romantic action and Douglas even more frequently boasts of his track record with women, the show will never again be *about* men wanting to get in a woman’s pants in quite the same way that it is in “Cremona.”

In fact, what happens–and as Arthur would say, this is brilliant–is that the male frustration plot gets transposed into the economic register, where instead of being about sex it’s about money. In every season there’s one episode where the boys spend the whole time buttering up a passenger in hopes of fulfilling a desperate need, and wind up humiliated and unsatisfied instead. But this passenger is not a Beautiful Woman; it’s Mr. Birling. 

Like Hester, Birling loves adulation; but since he’s not a film star, he has to get it the way most rich old men get it–by paying for it. And in all of the Birling days that *we* see, Birling is a huge tease. He leads them on, but he never puts out. Poor Martin never gets a dime out of Mr. Birling, as far as we ever know–despite all the toadying, and despite his willingness to turn to crime. Mr. Birling is really just as horrible as Hester is; but he’s structurally prevented from becoming a misogynist cliche (though his own misogyny is quite startlingly evident whenever he talks about his ‘awful wife’). It’s a joke we can *all* appreciate, except maybe for those of us who are alcoholic millionaire rugby fanatics. 


End file.
